OhhhhhhHHH FREAK OUT!

Okay, that title is just to make my mom laugh.

Seventy-six hours until my brother is here to visit! YAAAAAY! I'm excited. Today after school I'm going to get the tickets for Alex and I to take the night bus to Tokyo. It's an overnight bus trip and it's much cheaper than taking the trains. Then we'll be spending a few days in Tokyo, a few days in Kyoto, spending some time at home, before heading back to Tokyo to drop him back at the airport.

Then we've got to bust home on the shinkansen because I have school the next day. Whew!

Today is the last day of classes at the junior high. I had one English class in the morning, and for the rest of the day I spent time with a boy who doesn't usually come to school. He usually studies alone in a room, and I suspect he's bullied and doesn't do well around others, but he's really the sweetest kid. I talked to him about comics and movies and we studied cursive together (it's been a while for me too! He laughed at some of my mistakes) for about two hours or so.

At the end, the lunch bell rang and he said "Thanks for coming to talk to me. It's lonely studying by myself all the time."

It's like a little oasis in the stress, you know? I hope I can help him come to school more often.

From Shogakko to Graduation

Allo! The last few days have been particularly busy. Thursday was shogakko's mass 'birthday party', Friday was my last lesson of the school year at the other shogakko, Friday NIGHT was a big ol' potluck party at our apartment, and today was the graduation ceremony for our middle school third graders. Let's go in order, shall we?

Oh wait a second. First I have to do some stuff I promised to do a long time ago.

The English classroom is on the third floor of the school, and it falls to me to decorate it, which is cool, because I enjoy doing stuff like that. When summer changed to autumn last year, here's what I put up for my first wall decoration attempt.


Yeah, Nightmare Before Christmas! That's Jack, Sally, and Zero if you've never seen the movie, which would be tragic.

Except you probably wouldn't like it, Mom.

Please ignore the "Micky (sp) has more Easter Eggs than Minnie" over there. That has nothing to do with fall or Halloween. I just forgot to take it down before taking the picture. Eh heh.

Anyway, the kids really liked this. There were a bunch of the pumpkins, but the first graders stole/dismembered/destroyed a bunch of them, so.

Oh hey look, the winter decorations! As you can see I put a bit more work into these. Two of the penguins and most of the snowmen have become tragic casualties of the ichinensei (first graders).

But eh, middle school kids, whatcha gonna do.

I had a lot of fun making the snowflakes, and a lot of the kids were like, "How did you DO those?" For being Japan, the home of origami and papercrafts, I was really surprised to find that paper snowflakes were not a standard art form like in American elementary schools. But hey, that's cool! I'll teach them, someday. Mwaha.


This is the door to the nurse's office.

Apparently we get outbreaks of headpidgeons fairly frequently, and here you can see many little anime children of various hair colorosity waiting in line to have their headpidgeons cured by our sweet school nurse.

Bonus points if you get the reference. :D

Anyway, so the party on Thursday. The fourth graders were celebrating their collective tenth birthdays! The previous time I had told them that, in America, the tenth birthday party was a big deal. And we have parties of various types, etc, etc. They liked the idea of a theme party, and so they decided on their theme....

Princes, Princesses, and Samurai. Epic precious.

This is exactly as awesome as it looks. I caught this kid mid-conversation and it looked like Junior Hamlet.

See all the crowns and capes and stuff? They made those themselves, along with little samurai swords and broadswords, and little magic wands for the princesses. It was AWESOME.



Also, I taught the kids how to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey, hence the above video. If you listen, you can hear the kids yelling directions to their friends - "Migi" means 'right' and "Hidari" means 'left.' At the end of the video when you hear them yelling "Hai! Hai!!" they're volunteering to go next.

Here's a good shot of most of the class sitting together. One of the little princes has a red cape. It was supercute. SUPER CUTE.

There was even a girl samurai. You'll see her later though.


Then we all ate apple cake! The teacher, (standing in the middle) Aiko-sensei, asked me for a Michigan type of recipe, maybe with cherries.

But cherries are really, really expensive in Japan, so I went with something cheaper that also is really popular in Michigan - apples!

It was darn good cake. The kids all made it together. I was proud of them.

And now our different costume sets! First we have the Princesses.

Yep. They made me a crown.

This is probably the dorkiest picture of me that ever made me look like a dork, but I LOVE IT SO THERE.

See their magic wands and necklaces? They made me a little star necklace covered in foil, too. I will treasure it for ever and ever, or until I lose track of it which I do all the time.


And here we have the handsome and valiant princes! The one kid is determined to keep his sword in front of the other kid's face. I don't have any pictures of them where he's not doing this. It's kinda funny.

They all had so much fun with this. It was adorable.

And there are the brave and steadfast samurai! (with a prince stowing away in the picture in the back.) I thought it was so cool that one of the girls wanted to be a samurai, too! I was proud of her.

These guys had fun too with their ACTION pose.

I love my elementary school kids.

So then, on Friday, I had the first graders at the other elementary school!! They were so precious! I got totally mobbed though. That's always fun. We played musical chairs (which was easy for them, since it's really close to fruits basket, a traditional Japanese game. Also, musical chairs is really flipping easy, and I'm pretty sure SOME kids play it in Japan) and since I have all sorts of Super Mario Brothers music loaded on my iPod, that filled them with epic glee. And, they really know how to tell me what colors they like now! "I LIKE BLUE!"

Then I ate lunch with them in the lunchroom. Usually the lunchroom usage swaps between grades and classes, since there's only one small lunchroom for a huge school. The other classes eat lunch in their classrooms. The unique thing about Japanese schools is the students themselves serve lunch....even the first graders.

They all wear aprons, head-kerchiefs, and face masks, serving lunch to their classmates.

Everyone waits patiently (or impatiently) until everyone is served, and then the day-leaders stand in front, and yell "Be quiet!" repeatedly until everyone else is quiet.

This usually takes a while.

Then, everyone says "Itadakimasu!" (I humbly receive - kind of a secular grace that is rigidly followed in Japan) and is free to eat. Eating before 'itadakimasu' is a heinous offense and will result in several squeaking, peeping students suddenly bursting into a cacophony all around the offending party. It's adorable.

There you can see their school lunch. Fish and vegetables (The fish was full of bones!! No way would they get away with that in America! Some kid would choke and people would get sued and we'd only be able to eat pureed Fish Product or whatever. Still, I thought it was amazing!) along with a tofu-vegetable soup, a bowl of rice, an orange, and a carton of milk. No, you can't choose between white and chocolate here like ...well, like the schools I went to when I was a kid. But it's been a while since elementary for me so probably that was more of a middle-high school thing.

Then that night was the potluck party. I made spinach-artichoke dip and Alex made homemade pasta. Both were awesome. The rest of the conversation group brought stuff too. Really, really good stuff....in fact, too much, and way too much variety. I ate way too much and the next day I was like "UGGHGHGHGHHGH." It was unfortunate. But soooooo worth it.

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Then, today was graduation, and I bawled. But only because everyone else was bawling, even the male teachers. I'm going to miss the third graders. It was a big formal affair. The principal did a speech, the mayor of the town (wearing a kimono) did a speech, the new student council president (one of next year's third graders) did a speech, and the graduating student council president (a really sweet kid) did a speech. Lots of speeches. And songs. And tears and sniffling. But it was a good time.

More foods

For starters, I bought these mushrooms I had never seen before and decided to try cooking with them. I should know better than to try cooking a mysterious ingredient without a recipe in hand or at least an idea of what the ingredient tastes like. Luckily, this turned out well. I neglected to take a picture of the mushrooms, but if you want to do a Google image search for "nameko mushrooms", you'll likely come upon some tiny, yellow, slimy mushrooms. That's what these were. Tiny. Yellow. Slimy.

To be honest, I just stared at them after bringing them to my kitchen and thought, "Have these gone bad?" I had never eaten a slimy mushroom before. I had read about slimy mushrooms, but I couldn't recall anything about edible slimy mushrooms. I probably should have researched for details (as I did just before beginning this blog, so that I could tell you the name of this mushroom), but I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a food.

I cut up some chicken and half an onion, put them in a bowl with the mushrooms and added a marinade (soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar and oyster sauce). After a little while, I dumped it all in a pan, added a little water and cooked it all until the sauce thickened. We ate it with rice. It was rather good, and was really only slimy in appearance.

We've also been eating wasabi-green salads. That's the vegetable in question on the right. They have a mild flavor and just taste good. Mostly, the salads have consisted of wasabi greens, tomatoes and a special, super-thinly sliced ham that the Japanese use just for salads. I've also added shredded carrots and sliced cucumbers. I typically dress the salad with oil, vinegar, grated parmesan and herbs. Not an incredibly exciting salad, but we like it.

I also tried my hand at tempura. For those who don't know, tempura is a Japanese form of battered and deep-fried food. For my trial hand at tempura, I used eggplant, shrimp and na-no-hana (also known as "rape blossoms" - because they are the flowers of the rape plant). Na-no-hana are a popular spring vegetable and really, really good when deep-fried (not when lightly boiled or steamed). As you can see, the vegetable isn't actually in bloom, just yet; only budding. You can sometimes find bunches with flowers on them in the grocery store. As it is, it looks a bit like broccoli or broccoli rabe. It tastes nothing like broccoli. When tempura fried, you batter and fry the whole thing, leaves and all. Even with one tiny Japanese eggplant, one tiny package of shrimp and one tiny package of na-no-hana, we had two piles full of tempura-fried food by the time it was over. We ate a little bit and left the rest for the next day.

On a related note, since most Japanese households do not have central heating, during the winter some people will keep food in a room that does not have a space heater. Prepared foods are "refrigerated" just by sitting on the spare room table. They are always wrapped or lidded, of course. That's how we saved our leftover tempura; we left it in a cold room through the night.

Today, I was feeling ambitious. We've been getting together some kitchen supplies, like a rolling stick and a larger cutting board. Today, I made noodles. I used the basic directions laid out in Joy the Baker's blog. I made a huge mess, but I also made noodles! I'm proud of me. I added some red wine I kept around for cooking in hopes that it would turn the pasta purple. Instead, it turned imperceptibly grayish. They still taste good, though. The recipe made a lot of noodles, though, so we're probably going to have them at our potluck this Friday and maybe pass some out to the neighbors.

Oh my gosh.

I just received a handmade book, tied with a ribbon, full of post-it notes with well-wishes from one of the classes of the graduating third graders.

One boy wrote "I like you forever!"

I seriously think I'm going to cry.